Lord Ganesh, Munna Bhai, Kabhi Haan Kabhi SRK And Shortcuts

A student wrote herself additional marks in an exam paper in red ink and tried to fool her teacher into believing that the teacher had not totaled the marks correctly. The student did this because her (student's) mother had warned her daughter that if she didn't get good marks she, the mother,  wouldn't talk to her daughter. The daughter was not interested in exams or in marks and she chose the red pen as the tool to address this issue. 

This is very similar to what SRK did in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa where he got a fake certificate and Mark Sheets to prove that he passed his exams because he couldn't stand the taunting of his father. SRK again, in the movie,  had no interest in marks or in passing the exams. 

We come to Munna Bhai MBBS.  Sanjay Dutt (or Kamal Hassan in Vasool Raja) couldn't stand his father's taunts and hence fooled his parents into thinking he was a doctor. Again in the movie Sanjay / Kamal had no interest in being a doctor.

Now we come to the final example. Lord Shiva and his wife conducted a test for their two children. They said whoever could go around the world first would get a reward. Now Karthik (one of the sons) was physically adept and he immediately set off for on his around the world mission. The other son Ganesha was a boy who lived in a mental world and he was physically not strong. He twisted the target set by his parents - he went around them and claimed the prize explaining that for any person their parents constitute the world. The parents were dumbstruck and then very pleased and rewarded Ganesh. Whether Karthik (aka Murugan) complained about his brother's unfair practices is not known. 

Now we read 4 stories. In each of them the parent expected something from their child. The child had no interest in it. But in order only to satisfy the parents, the child took a shortcut. In the first three cases, the shortcut is found unacceptable. In the case of Ganesh, the shortcut was found admirable, even though his parents never imagined such a solution.. 

Did Ganesh violate the rules of the game?  In my book yes. 

Now,  Kabhi Haan and  Munna Bhai are fiction stories. The first example I mentioned is a real life example. It is quite possible that the girl's parents had often told her the very same Shiva-Ganesh story mentioned as the 4th example in this post. And yet we blame the girl while we adore Ganesh for his smartness.